CS INDUSTRY: History of digitisation and the impact

History of CD 

The digital format of a CD became public in 1980 with the first commercial CD player being created by Sony in 1982 released in Japan. The Sony CDP - 101 became available in worldwide in 1983. CD's where rising but still seen as a niche until the British rock band Dire Straits released their "Brothers in Arms" album alongside their new tour sponsored by Philips to advertise the CD format. The album was the first time a CD had outsold the vinyl format. This is seen as the album which kick started and made CD sales skyrocket. The sales quickly overtook vinyl and in 1991 overtook cassettes and became the leading form of distributing media.

Rise and Fall of CD sales

CD sales kept rising and rising with some experts claiming "indestructible industry" it rose to over 1 billion sales worldwide in early 90's all the way up to 2 billion in the mid 90's. Part of the reason for this was because people had bought 1 album on vinyl, then bought them on cassette and final bought the same album on CD. Artists and Bands had convinced many people to buy the new format as it became mainstream. The industry was booming. The big three where getting huge profits.

CD Sales from 1991 to 2015 (in millions)

There where people who predicted there would be a fall and who where developing the fully digital format know as MP3. This could be downloaded from the new world of the internet. Peer to peer file sharing became available with the launch of Napster in 1999. The online distribution method being so easy to access and free led to the first decline of CD sales. The highest selling point of this new form of distribution through Piracy was that it was free, and you could access it anywhere.The physical media format was disrupted by the digitization/convergence of the new age of Web 2.0.

The iPod

The invention of the iPod in 2001 also greatly affected the physical media sales. The sheer difference in size making this device extremely portable compared to the previous mainstream portable music player of the Sony Walkman. The iPod also had a whopping 5GB flash drive as storage which was huge compared to the other MP3 players at the time. Another major factor was the MP3 format, you didn't have to bring other physical media with you or chose which album you wanted to listen to before your commute as they where all downloaded onto the iPod. iTunes was introduced alongside the iPod which became the largest market place for digital media quickly. It was also easy to rip previous CD's and download them to your iTunes library. “Before that the MP3 was an inferior good, “Once you had the iPod, the CD was an inferior good. It could get cracked or lost, whereas MP3 files lasted.”  Quote from Stephen Witt. The impact wasn't large until smartphones where introduced in 2005 when people really began to exploit the piracy sites. The release of the iPhone was what made iTunes extremely popular.

Streaming
With the fall of CD sales and the rise of digital media through web 2.0/convergence and digitization, there was way of listening to music bound to arrive. YouTube was founded in 2005 and set the benchmark for streaming to come. Streaming was a legal and (sometimes) free way to access media and music across all devices with an internet connection. YouTube to date has over 1.5 billion registered accounts with the largest music specific paid for streaming service Spotify (launched in 2008)  having 87 million users subscribed with an estimate of 5 times more people using the free version. Streaming overtook global revenues for the first time in 2017 to become largest source of revenue for the global music industry. Streaming became the new mainstream and easiest way to listen to music still at a decent quality. 

Digipak/Monetization 

Monetizing music had already become harder due to digitization so artists and bands thought of new ways to earn money such as Merch and special editions of physical formats as seen with the Slayer example of limited edition Vinyl (as seen by the example on the left). It became more mainstream to have a promo package/digipak as it was harder to earn money from streaming. Streaming has caused controversy through low payment rates. Artists and Bands just aren't earning the same amount of money for streams than from previous singles or album sales on CD. It doesn't help that 80% of all music sales in the global industry go back to the big 3 as they are the ones profiting the most from streaming. It is calculated that Spotify (the largest paid streaming service for music) pays the artist $0.003 to $0.0084 per stream depending on a few variables. This is significantly less than what was earned before with an artist earning about $0.12 per single sale on CD's. 

Summary

The music industry boomed in the 80's and had the largest revenue with a total of over $38 billion at the end of the 20th century. A figure that is yet to be touched since. 

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Vodcast to go here

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INDUSTRY: What is indie and how does it work?

What is Indie?

Indie rock is a genre of rock music that originated in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Originally used to describe independent record labels, the term became associated with the music they produced and was initially used interchangeably with alternative rock.

Origins:

"Indie" was the term used to describe the music produced by punk rock labels. The Buzzcocks revolutionised the music industry by producing their record independently. 

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The BBC documentary Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie pinpoints the birth of indie as the 1977 self-publication of the Spiral Scratch EP by Buzzcocks. Although Buzzcocks are often classified as a punk band, it has been argued that the publication of Spiral Scratch independently of a major label led to the coining of the name "indie."

Commercial Breakthrough:

The Smith's, an indie rock band active during the 80's are credited as being one of the most important bands to come through the British indie scene. They paved the way for bands such as Oasis, the libertines and Arctic Monkeys.

The Stone Roses are an English rock band formed in Manchester in 1983. They were one of the pioneering groups of the Madchester movement that was active during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The band's most successful line-up consists of vocalist Ian Brown, guitarist John Squire, bassist Gary "Mani" Mounfield, and drummer Alan "Reni" Wren. The band released their debut album, The Stone Roses, in 1989. The album was a breakthrough success for the band and garnered critical acclaim, with many critics regarding it as one of the greatest British albums ever recorded. A chart battle between Blur and Oasis dubbed "The Battle of Britpop" brought Britpop to the forefront of the British press in 1995.

The 1990's brought major changes to the indie rock scene. Bands such as Oasis and Blur broke into the main stream, away from the small-scale and political elements of the 80's indie scene.

Decline and rebirth in indie Music:

In 1996 Oasis played in a two night set too a combine audience of 250,000 people and was credited at that time as the last great Britpop performance as nothing after that would match the scale. With Oasis's third album "Be here by now," initially receiving positive reviews and selling strongly it started ti subject itself to string criticism, as the genre and movement started to slow down and falter many bands started breaking up. Then along with the success of pop groups such as the Spice Girls it was seen as if they had "snatched the spirit if the age of those responsible for Britpop."

The revival of Indie Music is credited mostly to  The Libertines, the libertines were a British rock band, formed in London in 1997 by frontmen Carl Barât (vocals/guitar) and Pete Doherty (vocals/guitar). The band, centred on the song writing partnership of Barat and Doherty, also included John Hassall (bass) and Gary Powell (drums) for most of its recording career. The band was part of the indie rock revival and spearheaded the movement in the UK. The band were seen as saving Indie Rock and bringing it back to the attention of the media with often controversial circumstances such as Doherty’s drug abuse and there famous Guerilla gigs were they would invite fans around to there flat to play intimate gigs. The band gained some notoriety in the early 2000s. Although their mainstream success was initially limited, their profile soon grew, culminating in a No. 2 single and No. 1 album on the UK Charts. In December 2004, their self-titled second album was voted the second best album of the year by NME magazine.

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Now more recently the Arctic Monkeys are regarded as one of the most prominent bands to be part of the Indie Rock revival in the UK, after achieving commercial success and spawning two number one singles with their debut album and reached the status of being one of the biggest bands in the world having headlined Glastonbury and having multiple best selling albums across the world.

Distribution / self - distribution:

Traditionally, distributors got records into stores and labels got people to go buy them (through promotion). Along the way, each of these middlemen took a percentage of the revenue.
This system still exists today. At least to some extent but the role of distributors and record labels has changed dramatically. Not to mention the changes the internet has brought in the way people consume music. People spend more time online, and less money on physical music.

The change initially stemmed from indie music, in which indie artists (independent,) would produce there music without a label and produce the record themselves, one of the earliest examples and credited for the initial change was the punk band, then coined indie, The Buzzcocks. 

However more recently, the production of music independently has become much easier due to digitisation. Anyone can record and release their own music without the need for a record label. 

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Whilst the production and release of music has been made much easier to be done independently due to the digitisation and introduction of online music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music and Youtube, the monetisation of albums and music took a great hit.